The Billings plate. Relief from Copernicus GLO-30; rivers and lakes from USGS NHD; watersheds from the USGS Watershed Boundary Dataset; roads and city limits from Census TIGER 2024.
Mostly cloudy
Showers likely; cooler
Chance of showers; warmer
Sunny
Partly cloudy
Mostly cloudy
Chance of showers
86° on Nov. 17, 2016, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1914. Next is 82° in 1973.
Billings’s center stands about 1,010 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 950 ft to 1,050 ft, a difference of 100 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Wellington Formation (shale, sandstone, conglomerate), from the Permian, 252 to 299 million years old.
The section below crosses 3 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 64×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Shale, sandstone, conglomerate. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 million years old. About 14 mi of the line.
Sandstone, conglomerate. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 2 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale.
Heights from Copernicus GLO-90 (a surface model: it includes buildings and tree canopy); summits from USGS GNIS; rivers from USGS NHDPlus HR; rock from the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation.
A raindrop that lands in Billings reaches the Gulf of America by way of Red Rock Creek, the Arkansas and the Mississippi: about 1,220 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Murray Lake and Ozark Lake.
600 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Billings; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Billings has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 93° in July; winter nights fall to about 23° in January. About 35 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Billings normally reaches 60° and falls to 36°. The record high is 81°, in 1999; the record low 11°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 1.30 in, fell in 1993.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1914 at Billings, here. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
